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“I’m still trying to sort them out. She seemed interested in the vandalism at the school. Graffiti and a burned-out shed?”
“We thought that was Vince, targeting Mr. Stewart.” She shrugs. “We were filling in the blanks as best we could, but we never did figure out who was behind it.” I think again of the first diary entry:Something’s on that film that Vince doesn’t want me to see.And then directing me to the bonfire clip.
I pull my computer out of my bag and balance it on my knees, angling it so she can see the screen. I’ve cued it up to the bonfire. “What can you tell me about this night?” I ask.
Margot leans toward the screen, a tiny smile on her face. I watch her, looking for a hint of surprise or shock—to see if she can see what Poppy had seen.
When it’s over, she says, “We used to go to parties like that all the time.” She chuckles. “I don’t recall that particular one.”
“Can you watch it again?” I ask. “I’m curious to see if there’s anything off about it because I also came across Poppy’s diary.” Margot’s eyes latch on to me. “It’s cryptic,” I explain. “There’s nothing in there other than references to her movies, and she seemed to think this clip was important.”
Margot obliges and I play the clip again. When it’s over, she says, “I don’t see anything. It’s just a party.”
I sigh, another dead end. “I found another clip I think you’ll like,” I tell her, pulling up Poppy’s first reel in March, filled with family and friends. She’s holding the camera and spinning in a circle. You can see flashes of a table, with crumpled wrapping paper and the empty box of the Super 8 camera, her parents leaning against each other, watching her. Then there’s Danny at the firepit, feeding logs into the flames, and my father, sitting on the back steps, the house lit up behind him in the twilight, all of them wearing party hats. Around and around, we see them in flashes, smiling at her. Laughing at something someone has said. At one point, her parents are up and dancing to a song lost to time.
“That was her birthday,” Margot says, looking at me and giving me a sad smile. “The last one, in March. She was heartbroken when that camera got lost.”
I pause the video. “When was that?” I ask, thinking of the last entry in her diary.I’ve lost the proof.
“The week she died. She was devastated.”
“What happened to it?”
Margot shakes her head. “When I asked her, she just said,I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did that strike you as strange?”
“When something like this happens, you look at every incident, every small moment, trying to see the connections. To link events into a sequence that makes sense. But her camera meant everything to her, so I could understand why she’d be upset and not want to talk about it.”
I nod and press Play again, but my mind is somewhere else. Wondering how she could have lost the thing my father claims was in her hands every waking moment.
The party disappears, and I fast-forward to a clip near the end. A younger Margot is on the screen, doing cartwheels in the backyard. Danny enters the scene, messing up Poppy’s shot. You can see her hand slice out from behind the camera, waving him out of the way.
Margot leans forward, her expression softening, allowing her mind to travel back to a time when her friend was still alive, filled with potential. She reaches out to pause the video and points to a bracelet on Poppy’s wrist, a thin gold chain with a hook clasp. “I bought that for her birthday. She was wearing it the night she died,” she says, her voice just above a whisper. “I still have it; her mother gave it to me to keep.” Margot’s words shimmer with the pain and trauma she’s carried all these years. She’d only been fifteen when she watched her best friend walk away, a last moment squandered. What kind of fiction has she told herself over the years about what she could have done differently? How many nights has she lain awake, going over it again and again, yearning to go back in time and insist Poppy remain with her?
I unpause to finish the clip. A cat streaks across the frame and Margot says, “There’s Ricky Ricardo. Poor thing.”
“What?” I say, my tone sharp.
She looks at me, surprised. “He was Mr. Stewart’s cat. He went missing and Poppy was captain of the search committee. Posting flyers, going door to door. Asking to look in people’s garages and storage sheds.”
I think again of the notes in my father’s manuscript.I had to bury Ricky Ricardo quickly.Not a delusion, a memory. Which means perhaps the other margin notes are true as well.
“Did they ever find him?”
Margot shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Probably a coyote or something got to him. Poppy searched for about a week, but then gave up.”
Poppy
May 16, 1975
“Girls, I’m off to run some errands,” my mother says as she enters the kitchen. She eyes the open bag of potato chips on the table between me and Margot and sighs. “Maybe you could have some carrot sticks instead?” she suggests. “You’ll be glad you did when you’re my age.”
She doesn’t stick around long enough to hear me mutter, “You mean when I’m old and pickled with alcohol?”
But Margot laughs and takes another chip from the bag. “So who do you think did it?” she asks.
We’d been talking about the graffiti that appeared this morning in the school gym.